Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Meet the Data Transparency Coalition. The Washington Post‘s Capitol Business blog reports this morning: A small but growing collection of companies has formed a coalition that will push the federal government to establish a standard system by which agencies categorize their data. … “Our members understand that if the government identified its data elements in [...]
The Cato Institute’s jobs page has a new posting. If you have the right mix of data/technical skillz, public policy knowledge, love of freedom, and vim, this could be your chance to advance the ball on government transparency! [Added: For more background on Cato's transparency work, see this and this.] Data Curator, Center on Information [...]
Paying close attention to language can reveal what’s going on in the world around you. Note the simple but important differences between the phrases “open government” and “open government data.” In the former, the adjective “open” modifies the noun “government.” Hearing the phrase, one would rightly expect a government that’s more open. In the latter, [...]
President Obama’s third full year in office came to an end last week, and I’ve reviewed how well he’s doing with one particular campaign promise on the Cato@LIberty blog. “Sunlight Before Signing” is the moniker for the president’s campaign promise to post online the bills Congress sends him for five days before signing them. As [...]
At last Thursday’s FCC Open Commission Meeting, the Commission proposed to require television stations to make their “public inspection file” available online. But availability is not accessibility. If the FCC follows its usual practice of having filers submit PDFs (many of which are often scanned from printed documents), this data may be nearly useless to [...]
Remember when you had to wait until the end of the month to see your bank statement? Last week, on the cusp of failing to pass any annual appropriations bills ahead of the October 1 start of the new fiscal year, congressional leaders came up with a short-term government funding bill (or “continuing resolution”) that [...]
The Cato Institute is doing a live-streamed Capitol Hill briefing this morning—start-time 9:00 a.m. Eastern—on congressional transparency. You can see and download all the materials being released to Hill staff on a Cato@Liberty blog post summarizing where congressional transparency stands: “needs improvement.” You can watch the event live (or later on tape) and join the [...]
The White House’s release of its “Open Government Action Plan” today is timely. I’ll be rolling out the product of several months’ work on government transparency Friday at a Cato Institute event called “Publication Practices for Transparent Government: Rating the Congress.” The paper we’ll release commences as follows: Government transparency is a widely agreed upon [...]
Data-transparent government is still a ways off, but some small steps forward are underway. To wit, my project WashingtonWatch.com, which is adding new data going to the costs of bills in Congress. As detailed in an announcement that went up this morning, many more bills on the site will have cost estimates associated with them, [...]
Daily news service TechLawJournal (subscription) reports that the U.S. District Court (DC) has granted summary judgment to the National Security Agency in EPIC v. NSA, a federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case regarding the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s request for records regarding Google’s relationship with the NSA. EPIC requested a wide array of records [...]
May 27, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
